Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha is an American artist who combines Pop Art iconography with the documentarian rigour of Conceptual Art. His practice spans drawing, painting, photography, film, printmaking, and publishing, whilst Ruscha’s background as a graphic designer is evident in his subtle use of typography. 

He is best known for his artist’s books, such as Every Building on the Sunset Strip(1966), as well as his word paintings which skew the meaning of each word through colour, background, and font. “I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again.” 

Ruscha became well known in the late 1950s with small collages using images and words taken from everyday sources. This interest in the everyday led to him using the cityscape of his adopted hometown Los Angeles often combining images of the city with words and phrases from everyday language to communicate a particular urban experience. He also explores the banality of modern urban life and the barrage of mass media-fed images and information that confronts us daily.